The Official InMotion Hosting Blog

The Best and the Worst Website Hosting

Choosing a host for your website can be a tricky decision. With a large variety of hosts to navigate through it’s hard to cut out the bad from the good. Here’s the lowdown on selecting the best website hosting for your current project.

There are three categories you should look at when determining a host, and what the best hosts would do compared to what the worst hosting providers are guilty of doing.

Storage Space and Bandwidth

Worst Hosts: The worst hosts are going to offer you an embarrassingly low amount of storage space and bandwidth. And then when you need more, they will charge you much more to gain access to what you need. This is especially common with free hosting. They know that you will need more space eventually and they count on it. Once you want to add more space, you may pay much more than necessary to avoid the inconvenience of shopping around for a new hosting provider.

Good Hosts: A good host will have multiple plans available for you with varying amounts of storage space and bandwidth. Some will even offer unlimited storage space and bandwidth. If you happen to need more storage, you can upgrade to a new plan that comes with more benefits and not just more space.

Security

Worst Hosts: The worst hosts are not going to offer you all the best security options available. Sure, they might monitor the server for potential threats or set up a firewall, but chances are they won’t pay much attention to protecting your website. Most of the worst hosts don’t charge anything or charge very little, so they don’t really have a reason to dedicate time and resources to securing a free server, monitoring activity, or putting extra measures in place to combat hostile attacks or security issues.

Best Hosts: Best hosts will always care about the safety of their servers and your site. Firewalls, malware protection, constant monitoring and SSL certificates are the norm for the best website hosting plans. These hosts want their customers to be happy and safe so they will continue doing business with them. Security is the last thing a website creator wants to worry about or even knows how to tackle so it’s essential to partner with a web hosting company that makes site security a priority.

Uptime

Worst Hosts: Uptime, if you didn’t know already, is how much time your website spends being, well… up. You should be looking for an uptime of at least 99%. Hosts that just want your money and aren’t concerned about providing a decent product will have up uptimes lower than this. It might not seem like a lot, but simply going from 99% to 98% is a FOUR DAY DIFFERENCE throughout the year. FOUR DAYS! The closer to 100% you are, the better.

Best Hosts: If you haven’t noticed a pattern yet, the best hosts will offer the best amenities. Uptime is a crucial part of any website and top-notch hosts know this. This is why they offer 99% uptime and above. Again, the closer to 100% the better and these hosts will let you know how close. 99.999% is a common sight when it comes to advertising uptime. One of the best things is that you can easily fact check these numbers as well with a quick Google search.

While these three categories are very important, the best website hosting companies will also offer customer service to match. Having a support team behind you is a great feeling of comfort and security and makes everything about hosting that much better.

InMotion Hosting is considered by many to be the “best host”, but don’t just take our word for it, go check out the plans and see how getting the results you need is just a few clicks away.